In Figure 12 are shown the likelihood
distributions for the three baryon density determinations discussed
above. It is clear that these disparate determinations,
relying on completely different physics and from widely
separated epochs in the evolution of the universe are
in excellent agreement, providing strong support for
the standard, hot big bang cosmological model and for
the standard model of particle physics. Although it
has been emphasized many times in these lectures that
the errors are likely dominated by evolutionary and
systematic uncertainties and, therefore, are almost
certainly not normally distributed, it is hard to
avoid the temptation to combine these three independent
estimates. Succumbing to temptation:
10
= 5.8+0.4-0.6
(Bh2 = 0.021+0.0015-0.0020).

Figure 12. The likelihood distributions,
normalized to
equal areas under the curves, for the baryon-to-photon ratios
(10)
derived from BBN (~ 20
minutes), from the CMB (~ few hundred thousand
years), and for the present universe (t0 ~ 10 Gyr;
z 1).